Gizmodo

YouTube’s perpetual failure to ensure its product doesn’t exploit children has prompted an investigation by the Federal Trade Commission into the company.

Democratic commissioners at the FCC are still in the dark when it comes the agency’s ongoing investigation into the unauthorized sale of Americans’ geolocation data, Gizmodo has learned.

Spider-Man: Far From Home opens July 2, but press screenings have started—and, can you believe it? The early word is very positive. We joke because the early word on these movies is almost always very, very positive.Read more...

The Breakthrough Listen project has completed a sweeping search of over 1,700 nearby stars for signs of alien technology. Sadly, no evidence of extraterrestrials was found, but the $100 million project took a major leap forward in terms of its ability to continue the search.

Apple’s notorious for putting strict rules on who can and can’t repair their products—a sore point for Apple haters and lovers alike. But in a blog today, Apple announced that it’s expanded its authorized service network to include every Best Buy in America.Read more...

Scientists have discovered a pair of temperate, Earth-sized exoplanet candidates around a nearby star, according to a new paper. What makes this planetary system stand out from all the others discovered in recent years is just how similar one of its planets may be to Earth.Read more...

It’s official: The Clean Power Plan is out. Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Andrew Wheeler announced Wednesday the agency’s final replacement for the Obama-era rule, which aimed to reduce carbon emissions from the energy sector to combat climate change.Read more...

For years, Magic Leap operated in complete secrecy—not even revealing to the public what products or services it planned on producing. The clandestine approach created a strange mythos around the startup that finally started to clear at the end of 2017 when the company announced its flagship product, an augmented…Read more...

I’ve spent a lot of time looking at past predictions of the future over the years. But every once in a while I uncover something that’s so accurate, it’s almost spooky. This video from 1960 is just such a video.

Almost as quickly as notches appeared on phones, phone makers started looking for even more aggressive ways to hide a selfie cam including things like punch holes and hidden pop-ups. But even among the rare handsets with motorized cameras, the Asus Zenfone 6 stands alone. This thing is powerful, affordable, and unlike…Read more...

Slapping the term STEAM (science, technology, engineering, arts, and math) on a toy, even one with questionable educational value, has become a popular way for companies to convince parents a product is worth buying their kids. That’s rarely the case, but amongst all the noise there are a few companies producing toys…Read more...

In an effort to create more autonomous, life-like robots, scientists have developed a soft robotic lionfish with a multi-functional circulatory system. A blood-like compound powers the bot and provides propulsion.

For years, reports have emerged detailing the toll moderating online content takes on those tasked with cleaning up the websites of the most powerful tech companies. Facebook announced in May that it would make some changes so that a chunk of this moderator workforce (though not all of it) would be paid a little more…Read more...

Generative adversarial networks (GAN) can do a lot of things—it’s basically the type of machine learning used to generate realistic AI faces and deepfakes. But researchers at MIT are using GAN to do the holy, blessed work of building a neural network to teach computers how to make pizza.Read more...

The guy depicted above is Josh Hawley, a freshman Republican Senator representing Missouri, and he fundamentally does not understand how the internet works. How do we know this? Look no further than his fully ridiculous Ending Support for Internet Censorship Act, which seeks to overhaul a key feature of online…Read more...

“Get outta town!” That’s what you’ll say, and what you’ll do, when you see the fares on a whole bunch of Southwest Airlines flights. Flights for a range of routes from September 3 through December 18, 2019 (not including dates right around Thanksgiving, unfortunately) start at just $49 one way, and include…Read more...

On Monday, Canada’s Liberal Party voted en masse to declare a climate emergency in the House of Commons. Then on Tuesday, the Liberal Prime Minister Justin Trudeau approved the Trans Mountain Pipeline expansion that, when completed, will pump 590,000 barrels of highly-polluting tar sands oil from Alberta to British…Read more...

According to a new report from CNET, the Galaxy Note 10 is set to launch on August 7th in New York City, which based on the August 9th launch for the Note 9 last year, seems about right. But more important than the Note 10's launch, is what Samsung has planned for its next big phone.Read more...

Picking a smartphone to accompany you through life isn’t just about choosing between iOS and Android: It’s also about deciding which apps you’re going to pick for your emails, your driving directions, your music and so on. Having used both sets of native apps for years at this point, here’s our definitive verdict on…Read more...

Kingston A400 SSD 480GB SATA 3 2.5” Solid State Drive | $45 | AmazonRead more...

There are few activities that can turn the polite and civil discourse of a family gathering into a shouting match faster than a game of Monopoly. The latest edition replaces the designated banker with an intelligent, voice-activated top hat that handles all of the game’s financial transactions, giving players an…Read more...

Take a moment to think about all the street signs that blur past as you’re driving. Stop signs, speed limits, and traffic warnings all add up to a massive amount of infrastructure for a city that’s challenging and costly to maintain. But piggybacking on Google’s hard work, scientists have found a clever way to…Read more...

Peter Parker inducts Mysterio into the Avengers in new Spider-Man: Far From Home footage. Get your first look at Titans’ Superboy. Noah Centineo talks the responsibility of becoming He-Man. Plus, new clips from Child’s Play and Annabelle Comes Home, and filming begins on the next chapter of the Game of Thrones…Read more...

Apple is exploring a shift of anywhere from 15 percent to 30 percent of its production capacity outside of China to somewhere in Southeast Asia, according to a new report from the Nikkei Asia Review. The potential move is getting billed as a “fundamental restructuring” of Apple’s supply chain.

President Donald Trump has made a lot of broken promises during his time in office. He promised to lower prescription drug prices, get Mexico to pay for a border wall, and he even said a 10 percent tax cut for the middle class was on the way before the 2018 midterms. That tax cut never materialized, obviously. But the…Read more...

Dish Network Corp. is “in talks” to buy up assets that T-Mobile and Sprint are planning to sell off in order to have their terrible merger approved by antitrust authorities, Bloomberg reported on Tuesday.

The city of San Francisco has become the first in the U.S. to move to ban all sales of e-cigarettes in a unanimous vote by city supervisors, SFGate reported on Tuesday, in what officials characterized as an effort to fight back against youth vaping.

Facebook succeeded in at least one part of its new digital currency grand plan: Get a spotlight.

That’s a photo of a huntsman spider eating a pygmy possum. Yikes!

Cartoon Network’s promising new animated series, Infinity Train, finally has a new full trailer. But, much like our science geek hero Tulip, solving a puzzle to watch it is part of the adventure.Read more...

A billing collections agency that was hacked last year in an incident believed to impact millions of medical patients is now seeking a federal bankruptcy court’s protection from its own creditors.

RCS, or Rich Communication Services was supposed to be the messaging protocol that banished SMS to the dark ages and upgraded today’s texting experience with modern features like read receipts, better multimedia sharing, way bigger character limits, and more.Read more...

A startup focused on sexual wellness is suing the New York public transit system after its sex toy ad campaign was rejected. The company, Dame Labs, includes a pretty exhaustive list of other sexually-oriented advertisements that the MTA has run, including erectile dysfunction medication, condoms, women’s libido…Read more...

Spurred on by looming unfavorable legislation and stock market disappointment, Uber is reportedly playing hardball again, this time with the entire country of Austria.

Remember how the Wii’s groundbreaking motion controls helped Nintendo sell over 100 million consoles? Well, it turns out it wasn’t actually the first Nintendo console you could play by flailing around a joystick. Thanks to a third party accessory called the Hot Stik, the original NES had rudimentary motion controls…Read more...

New archaeological evidence suggests the inhabitants of Çatalhöyük, an ancient city founded over 9,000 years ago in what is now Turkey, were subject to many urban problems we’re familiar with today, including overcrowding, interpersonal violence, and sanitation issues.Read more...

The atmosphere has been heaving rain at the eastern U.S. like kids lob water balloons at a water fight. The never-ending barrage of rain has left the Midwest flooded, the Gulf of Mexico primed for a huge dead zone, and New Yorkers who walk everywhere stuck with perennially soggy shoes.Read more...

Scientists have spotted one of the most distant (and therefore the youngest) example of merging galaxies yet observed, according to new results.Read more...

If you want an electric pickup truck, you sort of don’t have any options right now because none currently exist for the public to buy, at least here in the U.S. There’s the Rivian R1T, of course, but it isn’t available yet. And there’s the Tesla pickup truck which we’re told might happen this summer. So, if you want…Read more...

Facebook’s new cryptocurrency is big news — and there are still a lot of big questions to be answered.

The HP Spectre x360 15-inch laptop is a lovely machine. It’s attractively designed, powerful enough for most big tasks, and features a new 15.6-inch OLED display that will make your eyes weep with joy. Too bad HP put a terrible trackpad on the thing.

Brother HL-2350DW Laser Printer | $80 | AmazonRead more...

Scientists have developed an adhesive that is both sticky and reusable thanks to inspiration from snail mucus, according to a new study.Read more...

Star Trek: Discovery is already charting itself a bold new course going into season three. Picard is on the way. And that’s before we get to the animated shows and the seemingly zillions of other Star Trek projects in the works. In an age with more Trek than ever before, how does its architect plan on avoiding…Read more...

A pair of fossilized teeth confirms the presence of hyenas north of the Arctic circle during the last Ice Age. The discovery fills an important fossil gap that finally explains how hyenas ended up in North America.Read more...

The internet was a purer place in 2016, and there’s no more perfect distillation of that truth than the spontaneous, crowdsourced effort to name a £200 million state-of-the-art research vessel Boaty McBoatface. The British government eventually decided to go with the more stately RRS Sir David Attenborough, but it…Read more...

Microsoft introduced the Windows key on the Microsoft Natural Keyboard back in 1994, and while sometimes it can be a bit annoying (like when you accidentally hit it while playing games), the Windows key has proven itself useful enough to find its way onto a huge number of third-party keyboards.Read more...

So ends one of the strangest piracy cases of the past few years, with lawyer turned lawbreaker Paul Hansmeier catching a whopping 168-month sentence for his role in a bizarre extortion scheme targeting internet users who downloaded porn.

After three months of being grounded following two fatal crashes in Ethiopia and Indonesia, the 737 Max may be up for a rebranding.Read more...

Competition is great for the consumer, but it also means you end up having to keep tabs on umpteen different subscriptions for services like streaming music, movies, and even games. In an effort to ensure none of them get forgotten along the way, it appears as if iOS 13 will include some handy reminders about who…Read more...